PRIMA addresses questions about the origins and growth of planets, supermassive black holes, stars, and dust. Much of the radiant energy from these formation processes is obscured and only emerges in the far infrared (IR) where PRIMA observes (24–261 um). PRIMA’s PI science program (25% of its 5-year mission) focuses on three questions and feeds a rich archival Guest Investigator program: How do exoplanets form and what are the origins of their atmospheres? How do galaxies’ black holes and stellar masses co-evolve over cosmic time? How do interstellar dust and metals build up in galaxies over time? PRIMA provides access to atomic (C, N, O, Ne) and molecular lines (HD, H2O, OH), redshifted PAH emission bands, and far-IR dust emission. PRIMA’s 1.8-m, 4.5-K telescope serves two instruments using sensitive KIDs: the Far-InfraRed Enhanced Survey Spectrometer (continuous, high-resolution spectral coverage with over an order of magnitude improvement in spectral line sensitivity and 3-5 orders of magnitude improvement in spectral survey speed) and the PRIMA Imager (hyperspectral imaging, broadband polarimetry). PRIMA opens new discovery space with 75% of the time for General Observers.
This talk will discuss the science activities associated with these studies performed by the Science, Technology, and Architecture Review Team (START) for the Habitable Worlds Observatory, including the team and organization, and with a focus on identifying those key science drivers which inform trades that will lead to architecture choices as the mission enters the Pre-Phase A stage and beyond.
NASA began the Great Observatory Maturation Program (GOMAP) with the goal of studying and advancing the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), a large ultraviolet, optical, infrared space telescope recommended by the Astro 2020 Decadal Survey. Among its many goals, HWO will obtain spectra of at least 25 exo-Earth candidates to search for signs of life and conduct transformative astrophysics at ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared wavelengths. The observatory, like HST and JWST, will be a powerful general class observatory. This past fall the GOMAP program stood up two study groups, the Science Technology Architecture Review Team (START) and the Technical Assessment Group (TAG) aimed at helping to study the science, technology and architecture options for this new flagship mission. This talk will discuss the engineering activities associated with these studies including the team and organization, the study plan and the use of the Concept Maturity Level (CML) approach. In addition, the talk will discuss the key initial engineering efforts, the key technology gaps, and overall engineering plans.
UV-SCOPE is a mission concept to determine the causes of atmospheric mass loss in exoplanets, investigate the mechanisms driving aerosol formation in hot Jupiters, and study the influence of the stellar environment on atmospheric evolution and habitability. As part of these investigations, the mission will generate a broad-purpose legacy database of time-domain ultraviolet (UV) spectra for nearly 200 stars and planets. The observatory consists of a 60 cm, f/10 telescope paired to a long-slit spectrograph, yielding simultaneous, almost continuous coverage between 1203 Å and 4000 Å, with resolutions ranging from 6000 to 240. The efficient instrument provides throughputs < 4% (far-UV; FUV) and < 15% (near-UV; NUV), comparable to HST/COS and much better than HST/STIS, over the same spectral range. A key design feature is the LiF prism, which serves as a dispersive element and provides high throughput even after accounting for radiation degradation. The use of two delta-doped Electron-Multiplying CCD detectors with UV-optimized, single-layer anti-reflection coatings provides high quantum efficiency and low detector noise. From the Earth-Sun second Lagrangian point, UV-SCOPE will continuously observe planetary transits and stellar variability in the full FUV-to-NUV range, with negligible astrophysical background. All these features make UV-SCOPE the ideal instrument to study exoplanetary atmospheres and the impact of host stars on their planets. UV-SCOPE was proposed to NASA as a Medium Explorer (MidEx) mission for the 2021 Announcement of Opportunity. If approved, the observatory will be developed over a 5-year period. Its primary science mission takes 34 months to complete. The spacecraft carries enough fuel for 6 years of operations.
KEYWORDS: Planets, Stars, Exoplanets, Imaging systems, Signal to noise ratio, Observatories, Telescopes, Target detection, Space telescopes, Monte Carlo methods
The addition of an external starshade to the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will enable the direct imaging of Earth-radius planets orbiting at ∼1 AU. Classification of any detected planets as Earth-like requires both spectroscopy to characterize their atmospheres and multi-epoch imaging to trace their orbits. We consider here the ability of the Starshade Rendezvous Probe to constrain the orbits of directly imaged Earth-like planets. The target list for this proposed mission consists of the 16 nearby stars best suited for direct imaging, around which ∼10 to 15 planets are expected to be discovered. Of these planets, ∼1 to 2 will be Earth-like in mass and temperature. The field of regard for the starshade mission is constrained by solar exclusion angles, resulting in four observing windows during a two-year mission. We find that for Earth-like planets that are detected at least three times during the four viewing opportunities, their semi-major axes are measured with a median precision of 7 mas, or a median fractional precision of 3%. Habitable-zone planets can be correctly identified as such 96.7% of the time, with a false positive rate of 2.8%. If a more conservative criteria are used for habitable-zone classification (95% probability), the false positive rate drops close to zero, but with only 81% of the truly Earth-like planets correctly classified as residing in the habitable zone.
Launching a starshade to rendezvous with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman) would provide the first opportunity to directly image the habitable zones (HZs) of nearby sunlike stars in the coming decade. A report on the science and feasibility of such a mission was recently submitted to NASA as a probe study concept. The driving objective of the concept is to determine whether Earth-like exoplanets exist in the HZs of the nearest sunlike stars and have biosignature gases in their atmospheres. With the sensitivity provided by this telescope, it is possible to measure the brightness of zodiacal dust disks around the nearest sunlike stars and establish how their population compares with our own. In addition, known gas-giant exoplanets can be targeted to measure their atmospheric metallicity and thereby determine if the correlation with planet mass follows the trend observed in the Solar System and hinted at by exoplanet transit spectroscopy data. We provide the details of the calculations used to estimate the sensitivity of Roman with a starshade and describe the publicly available Python-based source code used to make these calculations. Given the fixed capability of Roman and the constrained observing windows inherent for the starshade, we calculate the sensitivity of the combined observatory to detect these three types of targets, and we present an overall observing strategy that enables us to achieve these objectives.
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